[ih] Design choices in SMTP

[John Day]

What I get for not keeping up with the list. ;-)

> On Feb 8, 2023, at 16:45, Craig Partridge via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Feb 8, 2023 at 2:24 PM Dave Crocker via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 2/8/2023 1:02 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
>>> 
>>> Here RFC 354 (THE FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL) and RFC 385 (COMMENTS ON
>>> THE FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL) are missing, the latter includes MAIL
>>> and MLFL.
>> 
>> Count me as both befuddled and embarrassed.  No idea why/how I missed 385.
>> 
>> I left off 354 because it doesn't provide any email protocol specification.
>> 
>> The fact that 385 explicitly specifies MAIL and MLFL makes the fact that
>> neither are in the RFC 542 version of FTP quite odd..
>> 
>> 
> My recollection, from the digging into this that I did for the article on
> the history of email for IEEE Annals,  is there
> was a tension between the FTP and email teams.  There was a meeting about
> FTP at MIT in March 1973 (that led to 542) where the FTP team
> had decided to punt on email issues, only to have their DARPA PM (Steve
> Crocker) show up and tell them that email mattered.
> After the meeting, the group decided (in some sense, flouting Steve) that
> email should really be in a separate annex and left email
> commands out of RFC 542.  (As I recall, they were on a page by Jon Postel
> in the ARPANET Protocol Handbook but may be misremembering).
> 
> Craig
> 
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